Admittedly, the primary proposal for implementing judicial reform will be a time and money consuming activity. As an alternative, leaders of the Ohio Judicial System, namely Chief Justice O’Conner and the rest of the Ohio Supreme Court Justices could acknowledge the issues and institute measures to eliminate them.

The Mueller investigation and the Michigan State/USA Gymnastics sexual abuse case[1] provide recent examples that give us hope that we could get a greater degree of honesty and forthrightness from public officials. Given the present-day expectations. It is possible the Ohio judiciary might voluntarily repudiate deception and institute policies that promote logical rulings.

To this end, I have written the Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court asking for a demonstration of this commitment. One way this could be shown is for the Supreme Court to revive McMasters vs Green and admit to point by point examples of the deceptive and evasive techniques used by the Appeals Court. The second is to create an expectation for fair and contested judicial elections.

McMasters v. Green may not be the obvious choice for many of you. We have all heard of cases that show logic needs to be injected into the legal system. In order to affect this change, a deep knowledge of the case chosen is needed. That knowledge is available for McMasters v. Green. There is no doubt McMasters v. Green is a conflict about who should be required to either fire or quit when one party or the other wants to change the written agreement, yet, the Appeals court choose to deflect from answering this question and instead pretended this was case about the length of the contract[2]. It is logical to conclude the company broke the law when they implemented a drastic change in salary and that this contributed to the loss of over $1 billion of taxpayer money. The court contributed to this loss and because they failed to take action today, they doomed taxpayers to these same kind of losses in the future[3].

As we progress in this effort, it makes sense that others will bring to our attention cases that show the deceptive and evasive tactics used by courts that result in judges making up their own laws. I encourage you to write about these examples. Send them to us. Also post them on social media along with references to this campaign. For those that do not have the in-depth experience, show your support by telling the Ohio Supreme Court they need to revive McMasters v. Green and repudiate the deceptive tactics used in that case. Here is an address you can use to make that request.

When there is an incumbent - collusion prevents the fair election of judges

Post Script – a dilemma; Having the current members of the judiciary and law professions step up and institute change would be the simplest and most expediate way to accomplish these goals. Should there be consequences if this does not occur? What is an appropriate consequence

If it can be statistically proven it is unlikely uncontested elections of judges occurs by happenstance, one suggestion would be to eliminate any years earned toward retirement for any term when an incumbent judge was not challenged for re-election.

To show this, it would make sense to look at all the state-wide races and compare the number of uncontested re-election races there were for Governor, Attorney General, US Senator, Treasurer with the number of uncontested re-election races for Supreme Court Justice. Compare the number of uncontested re-election races for US Congress with those of Appellate Court Judge. It would also make sense to compare the number of contested judicial races when there was not an incumbent to those when there was an incumbent. If 90% of the time the incumbent Secretary of State faces a challenger but only 10% of the time a Supreme Court Justice faces a challenge, that is a good indication this is occurring due to unnatural forces – such as collusion in the law profession or coercion/perceived coercion by judges. The question becomes, if forced to do the hard work of reforming the judicial system through ballot initiative, does it make sense to also include language that imposes consequences.

[1] According to this Washington Post Article the former President of Michigan State, Ms. Lou Anne K Simon, was charged with a felony because when asked by an officer if she was aware of any investigation of Larry Nassar before 2016, she told them - she was aware a sports medicine doctor was under investigation - instead of just saying yes. If a response like Ms. Simon's results in a felony charge then Judges Donovan, Hall and Welbaum's choice to avoid the real issues in McMasters v Green, which resulted in the judicial system contributing to over $1 billion dollars of wasted taxpayer money, by pretending Mr. McMasters claimed to have a 3 year contract, when they knew he never made such a claim, must also be behavior that needs to have consequences.